For it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it.

Wednesday, 15 September 2010

Accelerationism paper

The less polemical version of the paper I gave at the accelerationism event is now available here. On the day I cut the first part on Foucault and made some more direct remarks to the arguments of Mark and Ray, I guess that can be found on the recorded version when it goes up. Thanks to Mark for organising and everyone who made up the large audience in a small hot room, I felt I would have liked the opportunity to chat more, especially with the audience.

somehow I zoned out on the firework comment so will have to listen to the tape. Tom has left a pretty astute comment under my intemperate rant on Trinketization - I think he makes some very good points there.

I'm curious as to who wrote this program, cuz they don't seem to have actually read Deleuze and Guattari (just as you throw around the adjective Deleuzoguattarian despite having read only 15 pages of AO). Probably I'm being overly protective, but I think one should not assume their question marks are periods. And other than this one quote, there's no reason to assume they are accelerationist. In fact, this:

"The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism's natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way."

It's futile to accelerate contradictions because capitalism because uses them all. This critique of accelerationism occurs several times in AO and is much clearer than their ambiguous questions about going further.

By the way, I enjoyed your paper, and Tom Bunyard's comment, because they hint at the centrality of labor. Though I don't think one needs to subscribe to the LTOV to prioritize the wage relation. Bringing up Foucault's neoliberalism lectures in this context is both astute and problematic, the former because he emphasizes how the form of capital-labor relations have changed, the latter because, as Spivak might say, he says a lot about domination but nothing about exploitation.